(www.RemnantNewspaper.com)
It appears as if Maryland, a state founded by
Catholics, named for the Catholic queen consort
of Britain’s King Charles I, site of the first Catholic Mass
in the British colonies, and one in which nearly 30
percent of the residents are Catholics, is about to
legalize homosexual “marriage.” The term is an oxymoron,
of course, but leftists never let logic and objective
truth impede their ideological cant. And like the
abortion issue, it appears as if Catholic politicians
will decide the issue, from the governor to the leaders
of Maryland’s General Assembly.

The bill recently cleared
the Judiciary Committee of the House of Delegates, and
before that, passed the
Maryland Senate, 25-21. In the run-up to that
contentious vote, The Washington Post provided
the correct headline over a story describing the debate
and the role Catholic politicians played in validating
sodomite “marriage:” “Md.’s top leaders cross Catholic
hierarchy on gay marriage.”

According to
the pro-homo Post, “Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley
regularly attends a weekday Mass and has sent his four
children to Catholic schools.”

House Speaker
Michael E. Busch
(D-Anne Arundel) used to teach and coach at his old
Catholic high school in Annapolis.

Senate President Thomas V.
Mike Miller Jr.
(D-Calvert) grew up serving as an altar boy in the
idyllic wood-frame Catholic church his family helped
build in Clinton.

But the presence of three Catholics at
the helm in Annapolis hasn't stopped a same-sex marriage
bill from wending its way through the legislature,
triggering deep disappointment among church leaders as
it suggests a waning of Catholic influence in this
heavily Catholic state.

Yes, it does suggest that, and the
article reveals, by quoting these men, how poorly
catechized the modern Catholic leader is.

The vocation I’ve chosen
for these last several years has been a vocation that
requires one to be of service to others in an arena of
compromise. It is a different vocation than the vocation
that a bishop or a cardinal chooses to fulfill, and
rightfully so.

O’Malley, the Post reports,
trots out a list of liberal causes he thinks Catholic
teaching enjoins him to support, and “has come to view
gay nuptials as a matter of ‘equal protection under the
law.’ It is one of several issues in which he is not ‘in
sync’ with the Catholic hierarchy.”

“Their job is to guard the tenets of the
faith, and, you know, it's understandable that the
church, for that reason, that they're slow to change,”
he said.

So because O’Malley is not a bishop, he
has the right and indeed the obligation to set aside
objective moral truth when he makes public policy. Any
minimally educated Catholic knows that all human beings,
regardless of “vocation,” have a positive duty to affirm
objective moral truth, and that the government has a
duty to ensure that laws reflect that truth. They also
know that evil has no rights. But Catholic politicians
agree with O’Malley, who modestly bills himself
as “a fearless, intelligent public servant.” He does not
claim to be minimally educated Catholic.

Sen. Robert J. Garagiola
told the Post that homosexuals will get the “same
rights” as he and his wife. “It’s an historic day for
equal justice under the law,” he said. He’s right about
that. What to homosexuals do in a bathhouse, the law
says, is no different than what a married man and woman
do when they create life.

Apostate Catholic Busch told
the Post that the nuns who schooled him imparted “a
value system of honesty, integrity, hard work and
discipline.”

Busch said he considers himself Catholic,
adding that “one day I hope they’re going to bury me a
Catholic.” He would not say how often he attends church,
offering only that “I’m not a guy who makes every
Sunday.”

Busch said he largely agrees with the
church on issues such as supporting the poor and
expanding access to health care. He has parted ways on
others, including abortion and embryonic stem-cell
research funding, which Maryland lawmakers approved in
2006.

“I don’t think I’m unlike a lot of other
members of the Catholic religion,” Busch said.

No doubt about that. Indeed, he is not
unlike a lot of teachers in Catholic schools, as Busch
once was, the Post informs readers. Naturally, Busch
peddled the non-sequitur that opposing homosexual
“marriage” is tantamount to “hatred.” “In wrestling with
the same-sex marriage issue,” the Post reported, “he
said he has asked himself how he would respond if one of
his daughters told him she was a lesbian. ‘Do you love
them any less? You love them the same. You want the best
for them.’”

Yes, but truly loving them, this man
educated by nuns should know, also means instructing
them properly and not encouraging them to sin. Clearly,
Busch must not have learned the nine ways of being
an accessory to another’s sin: by counsel, by command,
by consent, by provocation, by praise or flattery, by
concealment, by partaking, by silence and by defense of
the ill done. A bill such as this subsumes them all.

Then the Post informs us
about Miller, who is against homosexual marriage and
says his mother pushed him to vote for abortion. “Miller
said his mother told him that ‘it was a women's issue
and that I needed to support the women.’”

Miller also admits he’s “not a very good
Catholic despite regular attendance at churches in his
district.” Well, listening to what Miller believes, at
least one can say he is honest. “I think we should have
women for priests,” he told the Post. “I think there
should be contraception to stop the spread of AIDs in
Africa. I support capital punishment, and I'm pro-choice
in the early stages of pregnancy.”

One wonders why, then, he opposes
sodomite marriage, and Miller happily explains: “It’s
not really a Catholic thing,” he told
the Post. “I have a hard time associating family values
with people of the same sex being married. What is the
next definition of marriage going to be? At some point,
you have to draw the line.”

Another Catholic clown represents
Catholics from my hometown and attends Mass, apparently,
at a church I attend occasionally when I travel home: Immaculate Conception.
Sen. James Brochin
said it was
the “hate” that caused him to vote for sodomite
marriage. Brochin called the bill’s opponents
“appalling,”, and claimed that during a seven-hour
hearing on the bill, “Witness after witness demonized
homosexuals, vilified the gay community and described
gays and lesbians as pedophiles.” So Brochin now supports
homosexual “marriage.”

For me, the transition to supporting
marriage has not been an easy one, but the uncertainty,
fear and second-class status that gays and lesbians have
to put up with is far worse and clearly must come to an
end.

Actually, it’s apostates Catholics such
as like Brochin calling themselves Catholic that “must
come to an end,” but in any event, even more interesting
than who supported this bill — Catholics who should know
better — are those who opposed it.

For the record, not all Catholics in the
Maryland legislature supported the bill. Del. Michael
Hough of Frederick voted against it.

Opposition also came from
some liberal black Protestants. Said Sen. C. Anthony Muse,
the pastor of Ark of Safety
Christian Church, “Here’s my question: Where does it
stop?” Muse rightly observed that if homosexuals can
“marry,” then legalized polygamy will not be far behind.

Another black senator who voted against
the bill is Joanne C. Benson.
She told
the Post “she grew up watching her father officiate over
weddings and came to believe that such unions should be
reserved for people who can have children. ‘Two people
of the same sex cannot produce children,’ she said.”
Clearly, Mrs. Benson, hardly a right-winger, needs some
sensitivity and tolerance training from the Southern
Poverty Law Center.

As goes the country on religion, so goes
Maryland. Despite liberal views on some matters,
Protestants, particularly black Protestants, are in some
cases more reliable supporters of Catholic doctrine than
Catholics.

While the Church in Maryland lobbied
arduously against the bill, and announced its extreme
disappointment when it passed the Senate, no one in the
Church is discussing whether any of these Catholics can
present themselves for Holy Communion at Mass.

We find self-professed
Catholics, for example, who sustain and support the
right of a woman to procure the death of the infant in
her womb, or the right of two persons of the same sex to
the recognition which the State gives to a man and a
woman who have entered into marriage. It is not possible
to be a practicing Catholic and to conduct oneself
publicly in this manner. …

To ignore the fact that Catholics in
public life, for example, who persistently violate the
moral law regarding the inviolability of innocent human
life or the integrity of the marital union, lead many
into confusion or even error regarding the most
fundamental teachings of the moral law, in fact,
contributes to the confusion and error, redounding to
the gravest harm to our brothers and sisters, and,
therefore, to the whole nation. The perennial discipline
of the Church, for that reason among other reasons, has
prohibited the giving of Holy Communion and the granting
of a Church funeral to those who persist, after
admonition, in the grave violation of the moral law.

Burke is unafraid to defend the Faith. “I
would have to admonish him not to present himself for
Communion,” he said
of presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
in 2004. In 2009, he flung
down the gauntlet in front of pro-abortion Kathleen Sebelius,
former governor of Kansas and Secretary of Health and
Human Services: “No Catholic who publicly and
obstinately remains in serious sin can receive Holy
Communion. … Whether Governor Sebelius is in the
Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, or in any other
diocese, she should not present herself for Holy
Communion because, after pastoral admonition, she
obstinately persists in serious sin.”

The question, again, is what this means
for the priests and bishops who are not, as O’Malley
would put it, “in sync” with Burke. Is O’Malley
receiving when he goes to Mass? What about the others?
And if the priests are serving these politicians Holy
Communion, why hasn’t Archbishop Edwin O’Brien
stopped them? Perhaps they are afraid to use Holy
Eucharist as a “political weapon,” as the Catholic
leftists say.

After the bill passed Maryland’s Senate,
Mary Ellen Russell, chief of the Maryland Catholic Conference,
said “it’s
always troubling when someone in
such a public position openly disagrees with the
church.” She told the Post that the legislation was “a
critically important issue for the church.” Cardinal Donald Wuerl
of Washington, D.C., Archbishop O’Brien and Bishop Francis Malooly
of Delaware published a statement
after the vote. But it said nothing about any spiritual
penalties for Catholic politicians who supported the
bill.

But perhaps the more salient point is
this: Just as Catholics are responsible
for legal abortion in Maryland and across this country,
they can now take credit for attacking the sacrament of
marriage by conscripting the law to served
anti-Christian leftism and organized sodomy.

When Maryland solemnizes homosexual
“marriage,” Catholics can take
the blame.

R. Cort Kirkwood
is a contributor to The Remnant.
His last article discussed the near legalization
of infanticide in Texas.